#Departamento cartographica galaxy map

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Departamento cartographica galaxy map

#DEPARTAMENTO CARTOGRAPHICA GALAXY MAP FULL#

We are told that the journal now named The American Cartographer will become Cartography and Geographical Information Systems. The 'culture of technics' is everywhere rampant. It is better for us to begin from the premise that cartography is seldom what cartographers say it is.Īs they embrace computer-assisted methods and Geographical Information Systems, the scientistic rhetoric of map makers is becoming more strident. Of course, cartographers believe they have to say this to remain credible but historians do not have that obligation. In particular, we often tend to work from the premise that mappers engage in an unquestionably 'scientific' or 'objective' form of knowledge creation. For historians of cartography, I believe a major roadblock to understanding is that we still accept uncritically the broad consensus, with relatively few dissenting voices, of what cartographers tell us maps are supposed to be. My basic argument in this essay is that we should encourage an epistemological shift in the way we interpret the nature of cartography. Yet despite these symptoms of change, we are still, willingly or unwillingly, the prisoners of our own past. We can point to the names in our footnotes of (among others) Cassirer, Gombrich, Piaget, Panofsky, Kuhn, Barthes and Eco. Our students can now be directed to writings that draw on the ideas of information theory, linguistics, semiotics, structuralism, phenomenology, developmental theory, hermeneutics, iconology, marxism, and ideology. A list of individual explorations would, it is true, contain some that sound impressive. Applying conceptions of literary history to the history of cartography, it would appear that we are still working largely in either a 'premodern,' or a 'modern' rather than in a 'postmodern' climate of thought. Some would say that its achievements are largely cosmetic. The pace of conceptual exploration in the history of cartography-searching for alternative ways of understanding maps-is slow. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the casual eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it.

#DEPARTAMENTO CARTOGRAPHICA GALAXY MAP FULL#

That coastline there, that ragged scraw of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to posterity. Yet, looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it is a cold thing, a map, humourless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtsman's board. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing. Without me, you are alone and lost."Īnd indeed you are. A map says to you, "Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not." It says, "I am the earth in the palm of your hand.